Looks like much of this should load pretty well, one particully interesting (for me!) layer is “Submarine cables“. These load well in the new version, I’m guessing they will be updated in the future to work directly in new earth, but in the meantime you can change the data to underwater now!

Load a Layer as normal

Right click the top most folder of the layer eg “FT Submarine cables”, and slect Properties

Click the ‘Style, Color’ tab

Click ‘Share style’ button

Click the ‘Altitude’ tab

Change the dropdown to ‘Clamped to sea floor’

Press OK.

and then zoom down to view the cables laying on the sea floor!

You can see how the cable routes do actully follow the underwater tarrain…

Seems reports that Google Ocean where pretty accurate, Google have just released Google Earth v5, which besides the extra Sea floor data we saw last week, it actully makes the sea transparent so you can fly underwater… (not to mention a new ‘Ocean’ set of layers)

But thats not all, there are a wealth of other features…

Historic data, – you can now turn back time, and view older imagary. The data base is pretty comprensive – and quick! – but I guess (hope!) that more data will be added too….

Touring – From a couple of quick plays, GE5 has a new tour recording mode. Very easy to use, and seems to even capture changes to places (found by accident, correction: its “places” only, doesnt capture “layers” ), and even changes to the time slider

Planetry Bodies – The old ‘sky’ button is now a dropdown – with the addition of Mars. Its been possible to view mars imagry for a while, but its now in glorious 3D! (and gets its own set of layers)

Update: Richer HTML balloons – now balloons are rendered by a webkit browser, with Javascript and iFrames support! (more in a later post)

other minor changes…

More sun – the sun works for not just the past 24 hours now it seems.

New Timeslider – To ammonodate the new imargy and sun, the slider has been redesigned and moved. It even glows showing historic imagery, but its little difficult to get to grip – (update: not too bad with some practice! – perhaps it was just slow before…)

Overview Map moved – its now behind the Google Logo! Guess that saves space….

so it looks like extra stuff there – the new tours seems to be the main thing added in the gx namespace. Find out more about the Google Extensions Namespace: (more in a later post). Looks like this is going to be the way Google specific updates to KML is going to be handled now KML is controlled by OGC.

Update(s):

re KML namespace: making a few play tours and copying out the KML, the ‘touring language’ seems very comprehensive, recorsds small changes to view as a bunch of <Camera>, and pauses. Also only just noticed a ‘mic’ button, gonna have to dig out a microphone to try it… (I guess it can record a soundtrack for the tour)